For a second I don’t recognise her. She’s wearing a khaki funnel coat zipped up to her nose and her hair’s scraped back tight, not swishing around her shoulders in all its usual caramel and honey-blonde loveliness. The frown-line gives her away though. That, and the expensive shopping bags arranged neatly around her feet like pets – Liberty, Symthson, Penhaligon, Cos. She’s staring into space – completely oblivious to the shit-faced chanteur in the snowman onesie, now adding another charge to his sheet by belting out a racist version of ‘Deck the Halls’, peppered with the odd shout of ‘No Surrender to the IRA’. She startles when she sees me, as if she’s forgotten where she is and why she’s here.
‘Mrs Hicks.’
She stands up quickly and the pull-down chair snaps back against the wall, making her jump. She apologises, gathers up her bags, flustered.
‘Gina, please. I’m so sorry to drop in like this, are you busy?’
I swipe my pass and push the door. ‘Of course not, come through.’
I try the squishy room first – I’ve got a feeling this could be a squishy room conversation – but there’s an engaged sign slapped across and a horrible keening noise coming from inside. Some pour soul on the rough end of something. I show her into one of the main interview rooms and resist the urge to thank her for instantly making the room smell nicer.
She takes her coat off. Turns down an offer of tea.
‘So what can I do for you, Gina?’ My mind’s throwing out a hundred hypotheses, the main one being that she’s not a complete imbecile and she knows it shouldn’t have taken her husband ten minutes to steward us safely out of the main gates last night, and if she can’t get answers from him, she wants answers from me. ‘I assume you weren’t just passing?’ I say, nudging the Smythson bag with my boot. ‘Or is there any chance that’s for me? I’d die for one of their notebooks.’
She glances down. ‘Oh these.’ Again, that slight sense of disorientation. ‘Have it. I’m serious. I’ve bought them enough already, more than they deserve.’ She actually lifts up the bag and offers it to me. I shake my head, a little embarrassed. ‘I just needed an excuse to come into town. To come here.’
I say nothing and study her face. It’s less remarkable than I’d built it up to be. Attractive but in a commonplace sort of way. The lighting in these rooms are a great leveller.
She lets out a deep breath. ‘I knew her, you see. Alice.’ She pauses, rephrases. ‘Well, I didn’t know her, not really. Our paths crossed in the past – briefly but intensely, you might say.’
Not what I was expecting. There’s a pulsing at the top of my head. A frontal lobe reminder that now’s the time to use my good judgement and go and get Parnell.
But she asked to speak to me specifically.
I don’t want to panic her before we’ve even got going.
It’s also for this reason that I hold back the words, ‘lying to a police officer’, although I do let her know that I need to record everything and then I caution her, in my least cautionary voice possible.
‘God, I don’t know where to start.’ She arches her head right back. I hear the tension crunching through her neck. ‘I just tried to do a good thing and now I’m caught up in all this. I’m so sorry I lied, I truly am. I just . . .’
‘Just start at the beginning,’ I say, my voice as soft as a coo. ‘It’s fine, you’re doing the right thing, Gina.’
‘OK.’ She lays her palms flat on the table, steadies herself like it’s a business pitch. ‘About four years ago, Nate and I were in a bad place. Really bad. We’d been having IVF and it just wasn’t happening and well, it was tearing us apart. I think it’s because we’d both had kids with other people.’ My face says it all. ‘Oh right, sorry, Leo’s mine, Amber’s Nate’s. I mean, Amber was only four when we got together and Leo was only seven so we very much consider them our own.’ She gives a sad little sniff. ‘Nate’s wife died a year after Amber was born, you see. An undetected heart defect.’ Suddenly, her features harden. ‘And my ex is a complete waster who’s never bothered with Leo so it was perfect, we became an instant little family.’
‘But it’s natural to want children together.’
She lowers her gaze, nods at the table. ‘And we just assumed we would. Took it for granted, as you do. And when it didn’t happen . . . well, it’s cruel and it’s not logical, but when you’ve made a baby with someone else, but you can’t make a baby with your current partner, it kind of does something. It makes you view them differently, view your relationship differently. It did us, anyway, I can’t speak for everyone. But we ended up resenting each other, I suppose. It was just an incredibly bad time. Anyway, Nate ended up burying himself in work, which means burying himself in client dinners, and I was on my own night after night with my grief.’ Her eyes will me to understand. ‘I know it sounds dramatic, but that’s what it felt like, grief.’
‘I understand,’ I say, as soothing as I can. ‘And Alice, where does she come in?’
A deep sigh. ‘So, as I say, Nate buried himself in work, I buried myself in the internet. IVF forums. Support forums, that sort of thing. It was just a way to pass the time at first but then you start to recognise certain names, the regular posters, and you forge friendships in a weird type of way.’
‘And you met Alice on one of these forums?’
Another nod. ‘You end up talking about all sorts, really. It’s not all tales of woe, you find yourself chatting about what’s on TV, restaurants, husbands, everything. And I’d been chatting to Alice quite a bit and one day I just mentioned how I’d been to Hampton Court and how nice it was to have such a magnificent palace not too far away, and she said, “Oh, we must live fairly close then” and it turns out we did – she was Thames Ditton, right? Anyway, it went from there, really. We started chatting offline and arranged to meet up. It wasn’t a big deal, we just said we’d grab a coffee next time I was down her way or if she was around mine . . .’
‘So she gave you the impression she made regular trips into London?’
She gives a small shrug. ‘I suppose so, yes.’
I note this down. ‘OK, so you met up?’
‘Yes, just a few times. Once when I had to pop down her way to buy some hockey stuff for Amber, and then a couple of times at the café near me. The Donatella Caffé, except it wasn’t called that then. I forget the name.’
‘So what did she tell you about herself?’
She leans in, gossipy. ‘Well, this is it, I ended up doing most of the talking. She seemed quite shy in person and I knew quickly that we weren’t going to become best buddies but what I do remember though, is that she and her husband had only been trying for a year or so and she was still young, but she was really, really distressed that it hadn’t happened for them.’ She lets out a shrill laugh. ‘Here was I in my early forties, and we’d been trying for years, and yet it was me that ended up counselling her.’
‘Sounds frustrating.’
‘It was. It was intense. That’s why I phased her out, really. Made excuses not to meet up and so on. She didn’t seem that bothered. And then that sort of coincided with Nate and I getting back on track and well, you’ve seen where that led.’
‘You got your happy ending.’
She smiles. ‘I suppose I did, didn’t I? Doesn’t always feel like that when they’re doing a poo on the floor in John Lewis or wanting to play picnics at three in the morning.’
I laugh. She’s good company. I can see why Alice opened up to her.
‘Seriously, it’s so much harder when you’re that bit older.’ She sizes me up. ‘What are you, mid-twenties? Well, don’t leave it too late would be my advice. You just don’t have the energy. I was twenty-eight when I had Leo – whole different ball game.’
I smile. ‘I’ll bear it in mind. So you hadn’t seen Alice since then, until when?’
She looks rocked by the memory. ‘About a month ago, maybe a bit less. She just turned up out of the blue. Ambushed me. Not at the house but as I was coming up to the main gates. I had the twins in the buggy. Honestly I’ll never forget her face when she saw them.’
‘Did you feel threatened?’
She’s quick to respond. ‘No, no, nothing like that. She just looked . . . despairing. I know it’s stupid but I felt awful. Almost like I’d let her down. I know it sounds ridiculous.’
‘How did she know where you lived?’
A tiny vexed shake of the head. ‘She’d actually waited in the café on the main road – a few times, she told me – assuming I’d go past at some point and then she followed me.’
‘And what did she want?’
‘I’ll tell you what I wanted, Detective Kinsella.’
‘Cat, please.’
‘I wanted to get her away from my road, Cat. Nate was due back any minute and he didn’t know anything about my forum “adventures” and I wanted to keep it that way.’ Those pleading eyes again. ‘The whole IVF thing had nearly broken us. It was such an awful, awful time and I didn’t want it all coming back up again.’
I nod an understanding that I think is part-genuine.
She goes on. ‘So I left the twins with Leo – I said I’d left my card in Waitrose and had to go back – and I drove us to King George’s Park. She was in a dreadful state, she looked awful.’
‘Awful, how?’
‘Not scruffy exactly, but worn out. Definitely not how I remembered her. Like she’d kind of given up on life, I suppose.’
‘So what did she want?’ I repeat.
She gives me a flat stare. ‘Money. She said she’d left her husband, that the IVF had finally broken them, and that she needed some time to figure out what she was doing but she couldn’t support herself. It was all a bit pathetic to be honest.’
Which fits, although there’s something I’m struggling to get my head around.
‘She needs money so she runs to someone she met for a few coffees, four years ago?’
Her eyes widen in agreement. ‘I know! It’s mad, isn’t it? But she said she remembered how kind I’d been to her back then, how supportive, and how I was probably the only person who’d understand because Nate and I had nearly reached a similar point. She said she didn’t have any close family or friends she could turn to.’
Which fits.
‘I just felt so sorry for her. And I felt guilty. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through it but I felt so wretched that she’d seen me with the twins. I know how it feels to see other people have what you want so badly. And with me being ten years older, it must have seemed doubly unfair.’
‘So did you give her any money?’
‘I had sixty pounds in my purse and I gave her that. But I told her, and it was the truth, that I couldn’t give her any more. Nate’s not particularly stingy or controlling around money, but I couldn’t explain away a big chunk of cash, even if I’d wanted to.’
‘And she was OK with this?’
‘Yes, she wasn’t being aggressive, if that’s what you’re thinking. She said she completely understood, and then she said she might have to consider going back to her husband, at least for a while, but that she was certain he was having an affair and it was all so humiliating.’ Her eyes are on the cusp of watery. ‘That pressed a nerve, you could say. Leo’s father, if you can use the term, cheated on me and I stayed with him because I thought I had no other option at the time, and that’s exactly the word for it: humiliating.’
Nate Hicks and Saskia French. I feel sick for her.
She continues, ‘So I said – and it was impulsive and stupid, I know – she could stay at one of our properties for a bit, if that would help, and Saskia’s place in King’s Cross was the only realistic option if I wanted to keep it from Nate. Like we said, she’s been so quiet a tenant that we almost forget she’s there. Nate especially, seeing as the property’s mine.’
I frown. ‘And Saskia was fine to have a roommate all of a sudden?’
‘I said she was a family friend, that it’d only be temporary and I’d reduce the rent for that month.’ Her mouth twists into a scowl. ‘Saskia knows she’s on to a good thing. Do you know, I haven’t upped the rent on that place in seven years and how does she repay me – by turning my property into a bloody brothel!’
‘So it’s true you didn’t know about Saskia’s . . . profession?’
She looks horrified. ‘God no, I didn’t. I really didn’t.’
‘Saskia must have worried about it getting back to you through Alice?’ I write motive in my pad. ‘Did you have much contact with Alice once she’d moved in?’
‘No, none.’
‘Did she have your number, email address?’
‘No, I changed my email account a few years ago. We got burgled, you see. I wanted to change everything. And no, I didn’t give her my number, I just wanted the least communication possible. I said if she needed to get in contact with me, let Saskia know and I’d call her.’
I give her a dubious stare. ‘And that was it? You were going to let her stay there indefinitely?’
She brings her hands into her lap, clenches them tightly. ‘Well, no, initially I thought I’d leave her be for a few weeks and then see what her plans were. But then Christmas took over, and what with my dad, I didn’t exactly forget about her but it took a backseat. And I wouldn’t have asked her to leave just before Christmas. Bit Ebenezer Scrooge, don’t you think?’
I sit forward. ‘Gina, we know that Alice was in the Donatella Caffé on Friday December 12th, just a few days before she died. Do you think she might have been coming to tell you about what was going on in your flat? What Saskia was up to? I mean, it’s the least she could do, given the kindness you’d shown her.’
‘I’ve no idea. All I can tell you is I didn’t see her. She certainly didn’t come to the house, thank God.’ Her hand slams to her chest. ‘Oh my God, you don’t think Saskia has anything to do with this?’
‘Not necessarily,’ I lie, ‘but Saskia did lie to us. She gave us some cock-and-bull story about meeting Alice in a bar. About Alice also being a prostitute. Why would she say that?’
She thinks about this. ‘Well, look, I had nothing to do with that particular lie, but I did make it clear that I didn’t want Nate finding out about Alice being at the flat, so whatever Saskia said, she was just trying to make sure it didn’t lead back to me. As I say, she knows she’s on to a good thing. Is she going to get in trouble for this? Christ, am I?’
I ignore this, let her sweat a bit longer.
‘Gina, did Alice ever use the name Maryanne, either recently or when you knew her before? Saskia referred to her as Maryanne from the minute we met her whereas you knew her as Alice. Any idea why she’d have used a different name?’
‘None whatsoever.’ She throws her hands up. ‘Honestly, I’ve told you everything I know now. And I’m so sorry that I lied, I’ve never had so much as a library fine in my life, but I panicked. I just wanted to stay out of it. But really, this is just horrendous and I’m devastated by it all. I keep thinking if she’d just gone back to her husband, maybe she’d still be alive.’ She’s edging towards hysterical now, talking faster and faster. ‘I should have told her to go back to her husband, shouldn’t I? But I was honestly just trying to do a kind thing.’
‘I know, I know,’ I say, calming her. Then to bring her back to focus, I ask, ‘Can you remember the names of any of these forums you visited?’
She pulls at her lip, still edgy. ‘No. No, I’m sorry, I can’t. It just seems like a lifetime ago. And I don’t have that laptop anymore or you’d have been welcome to check. The bastards took it when we were burgled.’
Can’t say I’m too disappointed. If Alice had been on the forums recently, Forensics would have found them.
Although she could have been using her phone.
‘What happens now?’ Gina leans right forward and for a second I think she’s going to grab my hands but she stops about an inch short. ‘What happens about the fact I lied?’
Perverting the course of justice would be a long shot. I doubt it’d be considered in the public interest to waste valuable resources taking down a misguided Good Samaritan. Obstructing a police officer might fly, though. We’ve certainly prosecuted for less.
And yet when I look at her, all I feel is pity. Pity for a woman who tried to do a kind thing. Pity for a woman who’s run ragged looking after toddlers and policing teens while her father dies slowly under her roof.
Pity for a woman whose husband sleeps with prostitutes.
I push away my pity and summon my sternest tone. ‘We won’t do anything on this occasion, Gina. But mark my words, the threat of prosecution will be very real if I discover anything you’ve told me today to be false, or not the whole story, do you understand?’
Her eyes fill up and she starts searching for tissues in multiple pockets. ‘Thank you, Detective Kinsella. Thank you. There’s nothing else, I promise you. I just want to forget this ever happened and go home to my family.’
I stay seated as she gathers up her bags, pulls on her coat.
I say, ‘You really should speak to your husband though. Once we make an arrest and this goes to court, there’s every chance we’ll need you to go on record. Alice’s last few weeks will become public knowledge and he will find out.’
She shakes her head quickly. ‘No, no, I can’t, he’ll be so angry. If I have to in the future then so be it, but I’ll cross that bridge then . . .’
I think of Nate Hicks and Saskia French. Of Saskia French performing acts that any ‘self-respecting girlfriend would do if she could be bothered’. I think of Gina’s cheating ex-partner. Of the humiliation she endured.
I think about all the STDs that piece-of-shit husband has exposed her to.
‘Gina, trust me, you really need to speak to your husband.’
And I really need to speak to my boss.
*
Steele’s still out charming the top brass so I download everything onto Parnell, barely coming up for air in the hope he’ll be so dazzled by the speed of information that he’ll forget to bollock me for not halting the interview and hauling him in.
And he doesn’t bollock me. Far from it, in fact. It could be because it seems a little miserly, a little un-festive, to tear a strip off someone hours before waving them off on their hard-earned Christmas break.
It could be because he trusts me. Which makes me feel a myriad of mixed emotions, none of them particularly pleasant.
I made the right call not charging Gina, he says. However, it sounds like Saskia French might not be shown the same clemency. Her story about Maryanne working as a prostitute, especially the supposed ‘dodgy clients’ conversation, could have sent us completely in the wrong direction – hours and hours of time wasted chasing non-existent punters – and Parnell seems to view this in a much harsher light than Gina Hicks’ omission of truth. The CPS could well agree.
But then Saskia was lying to protect Gina.
Maybe I should have charged her?
I make tea then Parnell and I pore over the incident board, underlining Saskia’s name in thick red marker twice – one for each secret she had to keep from Gina that Alice Lapaine could have uncovered; her affair with her husband and the way she was earning her living. Under instruction from Parnell, I call Saskia to arrange for her to come into the station on Monday – just a chat, nothing to worry about – but all I get is her voicemail. A clipped bored instruction to the caller to leave a message and she’ll try to call back.
The try annoys me. The ‘I’m-just-so-busy’ self-importance of it.
Which makes me a hypocrite as I’ve now had six missed calls from my sister in the past twenty-four hours.
I’m a self-aware hypocrite though. A hypocrite with a conscience.
I dial Jacqui’s number and she answers within three rings.
‘You called?’ I say, with the heavy dose of irony that Jacqui never seems to pick up on.
‘Half a dozen times, Cat. No one’s that busy, not even you.’
There’s no nastiness there just that big-sister righteousness that sets my teeth on edge.
‘Look, I’m sorry, Jacqs, it’s just . . .’
She cuts in. ‘Oh, I know how super-important you are so I’ll be quick, don’t worry. Are you coming for Christmas lunch tomorrow? Well, let me rephrase that, you are coming for Christmas lunch tomorrow. I just want to know what time you’ll be here. Finn wants help with his Lego Batcave and me, Ash and Dad are “rubbish” apparently.’
Finn’s name seals it. I take a punt that his gorgeous little face and boundless effervescence will somehow balance out the crackling animosity that always threatens to surface when my family are gathered in a confined space. Textbook equilibrium, surely.
‘I’ll be there,’ I say to Jacqui, ‘What time’s lunch?’
‘Around threeish, but that doesn’t mean you turn up at two fifty-five. It’d be nice to have a proper family day for once.’
My mind boggles at what she means by ‘proper’ but I make a noncommittal noise that she takes as a yes.
‘Oh, and Finn will probably want to call you in the morning to tell you what Santa brought, so answer your bloody phone, please.’ I make an affirmative noise this time. ‘I don’t know, Dad’s getting as bad. There’s definitely something going on with him.’
I wish I wasn’t so highly attuned to all references to my dad but there’s a chink in my armour where the curiosity spews out. ‘What do you mean? Dad’s as bad at what?’
‘Answering his bloody phone! He’s usually so reliable but lately . . . take last Monday . . .’
The words erupt. ‘Dad? Reliable?’
‘Yes.’ That scolding voice again. ‘You should try seeing the good in people now and again. He’s amazing to us.’
‘Oh really, how?’ Exasperation, intrigue and a bolt of unexpected jealousy surges through me. That I manage to sound disinterested is a minor miracle.
‘In a thousand different ways, Cat, but mainly with Finn. Did you know Dad stays at ours when Ash is on nights, just in case I need someone to come to the hospital with me? Well he usually does . . .’
Everything stops for a moment. ‘Has Finn had any more seizures? You’ve got the neurologist any day, right?’
‘No, no, just that small one, last Monday night. It’s fine. He’s fine. But it was sod’s law, Ash was on nights last Monday and Dad had to cancel staying at ours at the last minute.’
‘Mr Reliable,’ I say without a hint of triumph.
‘But that’s what I mean,’ says Jacqui. ‘It’s so unlike him. And I couldn’t get hold of him all night either, to let him know what had happened. Voicemail, voicemail, bloody voicemail. To be fair, he was inconsolable the next day.’
‘And so where was he then?’
I’m starting to feel queasy. I’ve barely eaten today but it’s not lack of food. It’s something else.
‘Oh, I don’t know. Something came up, he said. You know I don’t pry.’ Jacqui’s voice is light and I want to shake her. Shake her and shake her and shake her until the happy-mist lifts from her eyes and she sees him for what he is. ‘I mean, where would anyone be on a Monday night? In bed, I suppose.’ She laughs awkwardly. ‘Whose bed is the question. Noel reckons . . .’
What ‘Noel reckons’ fades to nothing, exactly where it belongs, and Jacqui’s words fill my head. Deafening, like the peal of a warning bell.
‘I mean, where would anyone be on a Monday night?’
I hear drawers opening and closing, cutlery rattling, and the familiar slam of the mammoth fridge door as Jacqui moves around her kitchen busying herself with actions so she doesn’t have to stop and think about the fact that Dad put ‘something’ before her and Finn.
I try not to think about it too. I try not to think about the question I’ve been repeatedly asking people throughout the ten days of this investigation.
‘Where you were between eleven p.m. on Monday 15th December and five a.m. on Tuesday 16th December.
‘Something came up, he said.’